Wednesday PhotoEssay & Miscellany

Sorry about not posting for a while. If you’ve been following my Flickr stream, you’ll see that I’ve been posting pictures, but just haven’t gotten around to writing any posts.

The leaves on the Sweetgum trees were beautiful a couple weeks ago. They are still nice, but not quite as bright as they were.

This Shumard Oak was showing this great red color this fall. It will fade to brown over time.

With the leaves off the trees, it is easy to see what has been going on in those trees all summer. This gingko tree was home to a large squirrel nest in the top. It is kind of funny to see a squirrel nest made entirely of gingko leaves! I wonder if those squirrels have really good memory?

Since the overnight temperatures were getting cold last week, we decided to pick the rest of our Swiss Chard and Kale from our community garden plot. Do you think we have enough chard? It weighed in at 4 lbs 11 oz!

The first step in dealing with all that chard was to strip the leaves off the stems. You can see the mountain of stems and the cascade of leaves in this picture. The water glass is there for a little bit of scale…

I chopped the stems up and shredded the leaves. Then I sauteed them in batches with a little oil, salt, and pepper.

We ended up with a 4 quart freezer bags full of Swiss Chard to use during the winter. I’m sensing some of that yummy Swiss Chard & Sweet Potato Gratin in our future!